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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Outtake Tuesday: Cut Scene from A Perfect Man

When we pick up a book from the bookshelf, we're (hopefully) getting something that's been through multiple rounds of revisions and edits. We don't often get to see the early drafts and "mistakes." I decided, for the entertainment of my readers and for the use of anyone who wants to see why certain scenes or characters don't make it into a final draft, to post cut scenes from my published works.

A Perfect Man, which was released in May, has a lot of them because I worked on that book for a long time, off and on for three or four years. I have several cut scenes files, not sure why. Here are the contents of one of them, the original chapter five. An early version of the book had some extra characters, and others had different names. Phoebe, who I'll bring in a later book, is a biology student who is taking classes in the MFA program. I combined Carl and Albie into just Albie. Iain turned into Isaac, Sarah into Samantha.

Confused yet? Here's the deleted scene (warning - adult language):

Sarah sighed and put her face in her hands. This was going to be tough. Really tough. Karen might complain about her story being hijacked, but at least it meant she would have help! Meanwhile, she would discover the difference between writing what you know and putting yourself through hell to purge the wound you inflicted on yourself and your family.
“You don’t have to do this, you know.” The voice was familiar, soothing. It was also the voice that had told her, “You don’t have to feel guilty about this.”
“Fuck off,” she told it. She opened a new document in Word and started writing.
[story excerpt]

Those mesmerizing green eyes… “Are you kidding me?” she asked herself. The phone rang. It was Karen.

“I’m convening a session of the Bitch Club,” she said.

Sarah wiped the tear that crept down her cheek, smearing it up with the heel of her hand. “I’m…kind of busy right now. I’m, um, writing.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine. Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are we meeting?”
Even late on a Sunday night, the coffee shop was crowded, but Phoebe had gotten a table. Or, judging from the books piled there, Phoebe had already been camped out there all afternoon.
“Work hard today?” asked Sarah. She was the first one there.

Phoebe rolled her eyes and piled stuff so that Sarah could have space for her notebook. “I’m always working. And I can’t get this damn book off the ground. It would be so much easier if humans just reproduced by splitting themselves. Damn romance.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“Are you okay?"

Sarah sighed. Why did people keep asking her that? “Yeah, I’m fine. What do you want to drink?”

When she got back, Phoebe still sat alone. “Hey, Phoebe, question.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever do anything you really regretted? Like really hated yourself for?”

Phoebe frowned. “Not recently.”

“That’s a nice, evasive answer. I’m being serious.”

“I am, too. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to get past all that stuff.” She shrugged. “It’s just not worth it to drag it all out again.”

“Ah.” She wrapped her hands around the ceramic mug. The smooth curves fit her hands perfectly, and although the heat stung her skin, she found it to be comforting.

“Is there something you want to talk about, Sarah?” She saw that Phoebe was looking at her, her pretty cornflower blue eyes dark with concern.

Sarah shrugged. “It’s this writing project. It’s like I’ve got all this stuff that I need to get out, to purge, but I’m afraid of what I’m going to find underneath.”

“Like what?”

Karen and Lillian walked through the door before she could answer. Although the two young women were close in age, they couldn’t be more different in how they carried themselves. Karen looked young but with that confident air of a woman with her whole life ahead of her in spite of the pensive expression on her face. Lillian, only five or six years older, had that certain walk that women only had after they had given birth. Not that it was any less confident, but more careful. She smiled easily, but there was always a shadow lurking behind it, a whole cache of worries just below the surface about her family, especially her three kids.

“I’m surprised you were able to get away,” Karen said to Lillian as they sat down.

She nodded. “Me, too, but Paul said to go ahead. I think he’s relieved that I finally have some female friends, even if they’re in that program he doesn’t see the point in.”

When Karen left, Lillian leaned forward, and Phoebe and Sarah leaned in as well. Lillian checked behind her shoulder to make sure Karen indeed stood in line, and with a small grin said, “I think that they’ll end up together.”

“Who? Harrison and Lila?”

“No, Phoebe, Karen and Seth.”

Phoebe shook her head. “No way. I mean how cliché would that be?”

“Besides,” Sarah added, “you don’t want to shit where you eat, if you know what I mean. We’ve still got almost two years in this program. What if it didn’t work out?”

“But what if it did? They could be a cute writing team.”

“Until things go sour, then they’d be in a cute legal mess.” Sarah shook her head. “No way in hell.”

“Fine,” said Lillian. “Want to put a wager on it?”

Sarah sat back and pondered for a moment. “If we’re going to wager on our friend’s happiness, we need to make it worthwhile.”

“How about a hundred dollars?”

Phoebe whistled. “A hundred dollars?”

Lillian looked at her. “And don’t even think about asking what my husband would think. Yes, a hundred dollars.”

Sarah stuck her hand out. “You’re on! Phoebe?”

The petite blonde shook her head. “Too rich for my blood.”

“Fine, then, you can be the monitor. You can make sure that neither of us is trying to influence the outcome, that we play fair.”

Karen returned with her decaf soy latte and Lillian’s iced white mocha. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing, really.”

She sat down. “So what do I do?”

Sarah opened her mouth, but Phoebe’s look stopped her from giving Karen the advice she thought she should. She couldn’t try to influence the outcome of the bet. “I think you should just follow your heart.” The words felt strange on her tongue. Look where following her heart had led her.

“That’s not exactly what I was hoping for.” Karen slumped back in her chair.